James Pearce

So, my wife has a new job in India. We’re leaving Dublin to have a flavour of life in the sub-continent. It was a dilemma to figure out how to fit this in with my own career.

After much deliberation, we figured that it wouldn’t really be possible to continue my current role of CTO. As well as the traditional CTO-like activities (evangelism, slideshows, strategy, whiteboard death-match), I’ve also been leading the, now quite large, development team at dotMobi. Doing that properly needs someone nearby, and not offset by five-and-a-half hours. So the CTO (aka VP Technology) role is now in the hands of a very able replacement – there’s certainly a world-class team to continue the good work in Dublin.

But the good news is that I’ll still be involved with dotMobi, despite my geographic and temporal displacement. I’ll be consulting for the company as VP Emerging Technologies – which makes me a sort of a one-man research team. I’ll be slightly decoupled from the engineering activities of course – but, because there are still lots of innovative things that the company needs to do, I can make the most of my slightly remote perspective by pushing those inventions forward.

There are a couple of things I’ve got in mind. Firstly, I’d like to to help understand how dotMobi’s existing tools can be better used. I’ve got a DeviceAtlas WordPress plugin up my sleeve, for example – and I think there’s lots more we can do to make that platform easier to use in familiar runtime environments. We’d like to push DeviceAtlas further in the area of AJAX and CSS support. I expect I’ll rattle off a few posts for mobiForge. And I expect I’ll also be chipping in some ideas for Instant Mobilizer.

Although it will be a change not to be in the office every day, bouncing thoughts off everyone else, I think I’ll be very able to see these projects through without too much day-to-day distraction. Of course we’re a heavily connected team, so (Indian broadband permitting) I’ll still be able to stay in touch via Skype, email, Twitter and so on.

Co-incidentally, I’m pleased with the word ‘emerging’ in my role as I think will be wholly appropriate for my locale. We’ll be in a place called Nashik, a few hundred miles north-east of Mumbai. It’s small enough not to appear on most maps, but it’s got a population of 1.5 million or so. India of course, is emerging as both an economic and mobile phenomenon, both in the cities and rurally, and I think I’ll be well placed to watch these developments unfold.

What do I mean by by mobile phenomenon? Well I don’t know what that means on the ground yet – but I do know the country’s been gaining something like 10 million new subscribers a month. (That’s the population of Dublin every, um, working day). As well as the staggering numbers involved, I fully expect to discover that these millions of newly-connected mobile users are using the medium in exciting new ways. And surely many of them won’t already own a PC: so mobile web usage is undoubtedly going to feature heavily.

But I don’t really want to say too much about what I think I will see and experience – I know it’s going to be a huge adventure, but I also know that most of my assumptions (whether about the local mobile market or India in general) will be wrong. I’ve been a few times on holiday, but this is an altogether different kettle of fish, so I’m going with an entirely open mind. My Twitter account and blog are a blank canvas upon which I will try to describe what I see, smell and observe once I get there. (I’ll endeavor to keep a regular ‘mobile letter from India’ going).

Anyway, all in all, it’s daunting, but the situation looks like it will work out well. I’ll be spending more and more time researching some of the technical challenges that face the company – and the mobile industry as a whole – and hopefully coming up with some innovative solutions and neat technology. I’ll be able to see, first hand, a completely different side to the evolution of mobile communication, and I’m looking forward to blowing some of my Western preconceptions out of the water. Finally, of course, I’m hoping this will be a great experience for my children – who, after all, will consider India to be one of the major world economies when they are my age.

So, as of next week, good bye Europe (for a little while) and stay tuned!

This New Year marks my second anniversary of being CTO at dotMobi.

I’m making a big deal of this because, as of Thursday, I won’t be CTO at dotMobi. My wife Jayne, has landed a marketing job at a vineyard near Mumbai in India, and both of us, together with our two young children, are emigrating to live there.

Everything changes. So humour me. Rather than endless industry predictions you’ve been reading everywhere else this week, I’m going to indulge myself in a retrospective.

In my next post I’ll talk about what’s happening next. (Clue though: I’m not leaving the company!)

dotMobi was a fairly different place when I joined two years ago. The .mobi domain name had recently gone on sale, the company was focussed on being a domain registry, and most of the company’s technical capabilities were outsourced. But not entirely. Ronan and Ruadhan, who were both incumbent technologists when I arrived, had already started developing early versions of the developer community and the ready.mobi test tool. And through the work of Jo Rabin, the company was keenly supporting the mobile work of the W3C too. The seeds had been sown for the organisation to be able to play an important role in the mobile world – as well as for the domain community – and that’s why I took the job. During my two years, I’d like to think we stayed true to those ambitions.

Looking back, I spent relatively little time on the domain registry business per se – when I did it was mostly evangelism, blogging, and a bit of data mining. Of course we like to articulate why a mobile URL or domain is important if you want to let your users choose their experience via their address bar, and how you can use such a trustworthy mobile domain in conjunction with your existing web properties.

But dotMobi has other missions. For example, we want to help designers, web developers, marketeers, and businesses appreciate the potential of the mobile web as a whole. I’m passionate about the role that mobile will play in our on-line lives of the future, but I also recognise that someone’s got to actually build it. Given my recent career, it was natural that that agenda would shine through – and that’s been a large part of my work. With its highly reputable investors (not to mention a decent cashflow from the domain name business), the company’s uniquely placed to offer assistance to mobile developers and other companies throughout the ecosystem. It’s able to solve some nasty problems that would be unrewarding for, say, a more financially-backed company to undertake.

The hassle of mobile handset diversity, for example, is a huge pothole in the mobile web superhighway. We felt dotMobi had an obligation to help fill it in for the good of all the travellers on such a road. And so was born DeviceAtlas: designed to become the world’s leading database of mobile device information. I was lucky enough to be able to recruit WURFL founder Andrea Trasatti to the team in the summer of 2007, and convince him that dotMobi was the place to build such a thing. We launched just over 6 months later, and, although it’s a work in progress of course, we’re thrilled by what the team have created so far. (I still suspect it might end up being what we are all remembered for in years to come).

ready.mobi has also changed hugely in the last two years. It’s gone from being a fun little mobile rating tool to becoming an important part of many mobile developers’ toolkits. We’re supporting thousands of testers every day from around the world who are committed to producing quality mobile sites. With full site testing now available, and the recent release of a machine API, it’s never stood still. It remains the tool that many people know dotMobi for most.

The jewel in dotMobi’s crown is undoubtedly its developer community mobiForge (nee dev.mobi). Well over 20,000 developers regularly turn to the site for a stream of high quality material about the state of the mobile development world. Editor Ruadhan, together with all the team members and authors who contribute, deserve the credit for this. (I merely pull a few levers and press a few buttons behind the scenes; plus the occasional article). Sister site mobiThinking is also starting to make real strides.

In 2007, one of our major, if left-field, projects was find.mobi. At that time, we thought that mobile search was really an unsolved problem and that a lot of traditional search companies didn’t really understand mobile – and what mobile users want. (Hint: it’s not mangled PC web sites). Since we had to crawl an awful lot of .mobi sites for compliance reasons anyway, we started crawling other top-level domain sites as well, looking for made-for-mobile sites to flesh out a contextually-targetted directory and search service.

The technology is clever and at the time the UI was pretty unique: as an experiment it was very worthwhile. Not surprisingly, we weren’t able to give it the love and care it needed for a consumer launch. Also, incumbent services have improved since then. But… well, I still think mobile search is unfinished business: there are still some exciting possibilities being explored for the find.mobi technology.

Another technical excitement this year was the purchase of Mowser from Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl. They’ve moved on to other things now, but the Dublin engineering team have been pouring effort into its reincarnation, dubbed ‘Instant Mobilizer’. Yes, it’s a transcoder that takes non-mobile content and adjusts the syntax to better suit a mobile device, but it comes with a few twists.

Firstly, it’s an opt-in service: small businesses for example can subscribe to the service instead of having a new site built for themselves. Secondly, we don’t just perform markup gymnastics to hack a site to pieces: we also enhance pages with additional services that might be useful for mobile users. Thirdly, we don’t think that transcoding non-mobile sites is a particularly satisfactory end-game for the industry anyway. This, if you like, is a taster service that can open businesses’ eyes to the possibilities of mobile – but one which, if it does its job well, will help to promote the advantages of building mobile services properly subsequently.

Anyway, Ronan’s been leading that project, and it’s due for a launch in the New Year, so I’m not particularly due any credit! But it’s very neat, and keep an eye open for it in months to come.

I’ve had a fantastic couple of years living in Dublin. The city’s been warm and welcoming to both me and my family. Professionally, the city has been a great base for the company. Although it’s been hard hiring world class people, we’ve always made that a non-compromisable priority – and I’m really happy with the large, talented team of mobile-centric engineers that we’ve cultured. Outside of the technical team too, there’s a great team of people at dotMobi overall. It’s always been a pleasure to work with smart, international colleagues from across all the disciplines: Neil, Trey, Paul, Amy, Norbert, Vance – and many, many others.

The last two years have seen dotMobi play a more mature, supportive role within the mobile industry, and it has broadened its brief from domain names to many other, perhaps more altruistic, activities. I won’t ever be able to say that the mobile web has taken off because of us, or because of the small part I personally played – but I certainly know that when it comes to mobile, I’ve been in the most exciting place at the most exciting time.

In the next post, a bit more about the next chapter of our lives.

It feels strange blogging these days. Everything appears to fly past on Twitter instead.

But just an update on some things going on here. Firstly my movements, recently and soon:

• Mobile World Congress, Barcelona (it was OK)
• SXSW, Austin (not much mobile zeitgeist, and I felt old)
• A family skiing holiday (amazing snow for late March)
• CTIA in Las Vegas (my favourite city, ahem… but Mobile Jam will be cool)
• WWW2008 in Beijing (4 years since I was there last – will I recognise it?)
• MoMo Summit in Malaysia (2 years, but ditto)

There’s certainly no shortage of mobile-related shows on at at the moment. Plenty of gigs containing the words “mobile”, “web”, “2.0″ again this year. I think there are another two Spring events in London that I’ve missed from my list – and after all that I know I’m still, sadly, missing another sponsoree, Over The Air.

Secondly, things going on at dotMobi and elsewhere:

• DeviceAtlas (launched last month, roaring success, 1,000 users already, yes I wrote some of the code)
• Find.mobi (none of my code! but try flight codes and currency questions…)
• Dev.mobi (going from strength to strength…. 10,000 users)
• http://447867554666.mobi/ (and similar… interesting idea, no?)
• MetaJam (already paying some of the household bills; thanks AdMob!)
• HotTwit (a bit of malformed fun; probably could do more with it)
• IvyRoot (not even ready for prime-time on my own brain yet)
• Erlang (a solution looking for me to find a problem for)

So, I guess this blog post is sort of an almanac of what’s going on in my life, circa Q1 2008.

If you’re at any of the upcoming events above, I’ll see you soon. If you have any comments on these various projects, let me know

Along the lines of ”how to [..] feed your CTO“, and “N things you didn’t know about blogger X“, I was staring at my cluttered desktop, wondering what it all means.

Featuring…

• A variety of development tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio, MySQL, Wireshark, FTP, SCP, JMeter scripts, a JSON parser)
• The Android SDK
• Portions of a mobile web book I am writing
• Slideware for various products  & projects
• Domain analysis results
• An Ubuntu ISO image and an Apache install
• An OPML file of mobile blogs
• My registration form for MWC
• A JPG helpfully named “graph”
• A bunch of browsers
• The hiring plan for my team
• MetaWeb Query Language documentation
• Mobile Monday Dublin’s Peer Awards application forms
• Two mysterious text files called “yes” and “no” (?!)
• Some social network clients
• Something to listen to
• Armadillo Run
• …and a folder named “temp” – where all this rubbish is shortly headed.

Yes, that pretty much sums up the last 3 months of my life. What’s on your desktop – and why?

…but I’ll keep it short. That I can so easily tells you everything you need to know about the show.

There’s a lot going on at the the Mobile World Congress, and of course there are lots of sub-markets and sub-industries being represented. But the thrust of the show is pure telecoms. Device and infrastructure vendors trying to wow network operators.

Everything else (in particular, hall 7, complete with porn and prayer room) is really just a side show. However important you think content provision are, you can guarantee the telecoms world doesn’t.

So, on that basis, the show was rather disappointing.

If the handsets launched were supposed to be some sort of comeback, then Cupertino will sleep easily. That side of the show was dominated by one company – who didn’t even turn up – and I thought everything else was utterly underwhelming. (At most I might see myself with an X1)

And on the network side, I’ve rather lost track. The acronyms are getting farcical. Too long for me to remember which ones are which, and which ones are actually synonyms for something else. So forgive my naive conclusion that there was little news there either.

In previous years, the implicit message from GSM was “We are the Masters of the Universe”. This year, there’s nervousness. This is an industry that knows it is about to be disrupted, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it.

On a personal note, the show was most notable for the number of virtual folks I finally got to meet: James Whatley gets special thanks for finding me a personal mobby. After days of being locked in with analysts and journalists, it was nice to come out blinking into the sun and meet people who speak my language

Wondered where I’d gone? Thought we’d been a bit quiet at dotMobi for a little while?

Sorry

Next week is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And if you’re blogging, you can’t also be flat out trying to release something seismic for the mobile world.

DeviceAtlas. A huge lump of tarmac falling from the sky to fill in that huge pothole in the middle of the mobile superhighway (the one labelled “too many damn devices”). And Find.mobi. Start all over again and re-imagine search for mobile from the ground up. What would it look like?

Any idea of how involved these are? I only just realised I’m doing an introduction at the MoMo Peer Awards on Monday.

If you’re one of the 1,000 people waiting for email from me, don’t panic. I am alive. Just. (“Yes! We found the memory leak!”)

Sleep can wait. All coming soon. I’ll see you next week.

…gives me an upgrade. Silk pajamas and duvet all the way to Hong Kong.

Now back to work… here for the ICANN regional meeting.